to shift its manner, almost as if on your first pass it was putting on airs.

Now it slouches a bit, spits on the dirt, adjusts its crotch. The streets are muddier, the wet earth a suspicious shade and smell sucking at each step you take. The buildings are more worn, busted windows, peeling paint, split shingles fallen from roofs, it’s all scummier than just minutes ago.

An odd detail in the landscape makes you pause. In a shadow of yellowish muck beside a saloon (doors shut, cracked window filled inwardly with what looks like waxpaper, a sole white sheet affixed to the exterior: For Selling)—here, in the shadow of the off-leaning saloon’s awning rests, at your feet, in shadow, in rackish mud, a small dead bird. One gentle wing gathered over its slain form, slain eyes, like a child tucked to sleep against the commotion of day.

You look up at the crack in the saloon window. Down again at the bird. Is something to be understood in this. A constellation between two dismal stars: a lesson, of sorts: as in, a death describes a life: a circle describes an arc: a shadow, a light. Or better: a word describes a mind, a mind existence, existence meaning. And meaning means what, what follows, an author of creation, of this barren place? Not likely.

All this time of your backtracking, all about you, the streets are empty. As if you’ve stumbled onto a forgotten movie set. You extend your toe toward the bird and as your muddy boot makes contact you can’t help but flinch—perhaps it is only sleeping and will start suddenly with the fury of life.

The dead body yields to the pressure, doesn’t move so much as cave.

The death of small things is always depressing.

As you resume walking, if a bit morose now, it is as if a wand has passed over the town: the streets resume their existence, shoppers on the boardwalk, horsemen in the thoroughfare, peddlers selling wares and sausages and oysters plucked fresh from the sea. You move through it all, worried for the girl you saw with the two grim men. The mud slows your pace, and you recall once in childhood being chided for dragging your feet, scuffling your soles. Your first ever day of school. After years sheltered inside, who wouldn’t be resistant? Who would want to leave the warm bosom of home for strange buildings filled with stranger strangers?

Those were the days, you recall, succumbing to memory, of the comet in the sky.

The comet of your youth. At night it was something to look at, the smeared glowing blur across the sky, a firefly crushed by a child’s thumb, a bird by a too-hard pain of glass. There was a delight in watching it, as in anything that glows the darkness with a bit of color and magic.

Only nights, though. In the days the comet was awful to behold: a red-rimmed eye that unceasingly gazed upon you. Your mother told you often that it was no eye, there was no hidden face behind it, no invisible form staring down you, at the entire planet, considering what awful things to do. Your teacher, too, had to calm your nerves: at recess, you preferred to stay in the classroom, out of sight, and she would goad you outdoors with the other children who didn’t care a whit about the burning eye in the sky. Lunatics. It was as if they couldn’t see it, couldn’t sense that the life they were leading all around them was but an illusion, the eye the real thing, the truth beyond it all.

Only one ever shared your fear. A boy who began weeks after the start of term. He was assigned to the desk beside your own, a dark complexioned boy, slight and sensitive to light, frail blood. Rumors circulated—he was an orphan, from the orphanage, dropped off each day by a white van, a frowner with mustache, always quick to turn back into the road. You considered this: to go home to a place where no one would hug you, feed you, love you. At home some nights you felt guilty. Your appetite diminished. Your mother asked you what ailed you, but you kept it all in.

He found you one day at recess, during those comet-days, hiding in the boy’s bathroom.

“Listen,” he said. “That eye is a weak eye. You have nothing to fear from it.”

He took out a small kitchen knife.

“Come,” he said. “We will take blood-oath. We will be brothers-against-the-eye.”

You felt so alarmed at how well he knew you that the knife slicking your palm didn’t hurt.

Not much later the comet stopped staring at you.

Not much later the mustached man came into the class and pointed at your blood-brother, took him away for good.

Those sad comet days. The comet was gone, the feeling lingered, it still does. You were such a sensitive child. Weather gave you as much unrest as people. Storms kept you up at night, flinching. Fear of lightning, of thunder, of talking to strangers, revealing yourself. Anything that could be used in the predictive arts disturbed you. Clouds. Distant smoke hanging fat on the sky. Chicken bones. You and your strange proclivities. You’ve gotten over it, sort of, over the years, that uneasy fear of magic and society both.

It’s not real. It’s just pretend.

It will be over soon.

The way we soothe ourselves, eyes shut against the monsters in the dark.

“Hey, Mister, look out there.”

Sitting on a rocking chair on a boardwalk raised above the mucking streets, laid alongside an office building, the girl. As she stares at you, she has a strangeness to her: a gathering behind her eyes that belies more years than her form suggests. Twelve, thirteen. She is dressed inappropriately: you glimpse a tiny fold of shiny belly skin between her yellow t-shirt and white gym shorts. She sits on the chair’s edge so that it tilts forward, as if readying to launch herself from it. The chair faces you, putting you in the position of target.

She blows a pink bubble until it bursts, and smiles.

“Looking for my friends, weren’t you. That’s dull.”

You aren’t sure how you’ll explain yourself–how do any of us know why we do what we do when we do it?–and she likely does care as she eases back into the chair, shuts her eyes, and begins a story. Practiced, at least prepared: as if she’s been waiting here for you to tell you her tale.

All the rest in this town (she explains) know and don’t care about my terrible existence. It is all, she says, rocking slowly, totally lame. It began with the arrival in my household of a foreign man who married my poor foolish mother—and that SOB almost immediately began gazing longingly on me. Dirty bird. Each morning, day, and evening, his eyes were like a comet, staring at me with gross old man passion. Had nothing to do with me, just this body that holds me. That’s the life I get to lead, I guess.

She tells how things got worse: the death of her mother, hit by a car while picking up a penny: the foreigner becoming her guardian, sharing—and finally realizing—his lascivious hopes for her. You can’t bear to listen, yet you do, and sooty grime creeps upon you with each word she speaks. Even as she speaks, the girl tells her tale idly, half-interested. How she was caravanned across the country. Kidnapped by the first man, then a second man who came along, the two rivals trying to possess her again and again.

“I’m over it. It’s happened since I was a girl. It’s happening now.” She yawns and reaches down to scratch her bare girlish legs. “I think they like driving all around and staying at hotels, you know? Touring the country like a coupla old farts.” She looks at you with those long-lidded eyes, and you almost turn away, distrusting yourself. “I’m just an idea,” she says. “That’s it. That’s me: just this tart thing that lets them get away with being dullards.”

This poor girl. Those terrible men.

An anger, a violence begins to itch inside you. This girl must be avenged.

You charge toward her and she leans away, fear in her eyes. You point an insistent finger: Where are they now? The two men?

She cowers, hiding her eyes. Her voice is weak as she lifts a quavering finger toward the road: “One went that way. The other, the other way. Here,” she says, pressing a crumpled note into your hand. “This is where to find them.

“And know this,” she says, her blue eyes damp with tears: “they are brothers.”

If you follow the first, 101.

If you follow the second, 104.